Everywhere I go, the world is noisy, unbearably loud. I can’t stand the sharpness of laughter that pierces the air. I struggle to understand today’s people—their ways, their minds. My friends were once like brothers to me. We spent Friday nights together, savoring the weekend as if it were sacred. But now, everything has changed. Faces are unmasked, and I can clearly see who’s my friend and who’s not.
I’m tired of falling into people’s hands like a losing card, shuffled and discarded. Judgment comes at me mercilessly from all sides. I’m no saint, but my needs feel ignored, my voice silenced. In my exile, my siblings are like sunsets—beautiful but distant. My parents are storms, rumbling and restless.
I wonder if my coworkers and so-called friends notice the bruises on my face. Sometimes, I can’t even find my own body, lost in the heaviness of burying a piece of myself alive. I wrote my final voiceless poem, but as a stateless man, the world gave me a name: The Kite.
They fly me against the wind, just to watch me falter, to see me suspended between the clouds and the earth, barely tethered. Those who mock my accent, the foreign characters with beautiful faces—they steal my breath with their words.
I hug a woman, not out of nervousness but to anchor myself. Yet I bleed brutally when I fly too far, becoming incurable, untouchable. My mother cried the day I was born, sensing something in my face—a mark, an omen—that none of my siblings carried. She calms my father whenever I come home drunk, but she never shares the truth with him or anyone else. Only my homeland knows the full weight of it.
In my grandparents’ time, I would have been a leafless corpse on a mountaintop, touched by fingers and tongues seeking blessings. Now, I seek isolation—not to sin, but to find meaning. To bloom in peace. To live where butterflies don’t die from human greed, where roses aren’t picked in screams.
A child in an orphanage once celebrated his first birthday with nothing but wishes—soft, muted whispers. I don’t want to hear the world’s loudness anymore. I hear it all too clearly, but I can’t promise anything. I’ve been sitting in this metaphorical wheelchair for far too long.
Pietro della Vecchia – Tiresias transformed into a woman
“Tiresias Disrobes” by Mark Blickley “A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.” ~ Tennessee Williams
One day in ancient Greece, Tiresias was walking down a path when he was interrupted by two snakes copulating on the road, blocking his way. Tiresias got so angry that he took his staff and killed one of the snakes. It turned out to be the female s/erpent. What Tiresias didn’t know was that these snakes were guarding Hera’s sacred tree with golden apples in the Garden of the Hesperides. Hera’s rage, upon learning of the death of her beloved female guardian snake, was to turn Tiresias into a woman.
For ten years Tiresias lived as a woman. And not just as any woman, but the town whore. One day the female Tiresias was walking down a path and once again came upon two snakes copulating. She killed one and this time it turned out the slain serpent was male, so Hera changed him back to a male. These gender transformations made Tiresias the only man in the history of the world to have been both a man and a woman.
Years later, Zeus and Hera were having a terrible fight on Mount Olympus about who enjoys sex more, the man or the woman. Hera had caught her insatiable husband once again cheating on her. Zeus roared females enjoy sex more than men. Hera called him a liar and claimed females accommodate the male out of duty, not pleasure.
Zeus called her a liar. Hera screamed back that her husband was a Trickster and a vicious rapist. Their battle over which gender derives the greatest satisfaction from carnal knowledge went on for days. A frustrated Hera finally decided to summon Tiresias to Mount Olympus to settle their heated dispute. Tiresias’ unique experience of indulging in sexual intercourse as both a man and a woman could supply the definitive answer.
Poor Tiresias was summoned to the foot of their thrones where Hera ordered him to respond to the question of whom achieves more satisfaction from sexual intercourse—the man or the woman. Tiresias drew a breath, fearful of the consequences of any opinion he would admit. But he decided to tell the truth and answered, “It is nine parts female, one part male.”
An enraged Hera did not allow Tiresias to explain which nine parts favored women and what single part favored men because she immediately blinded him for exposing her feminine truth to Zeus, thus losing their argument.
One god cannot undo the spell of another god, not even the King of the Gods, Zeus. Yet taking pity on Tiresias, Zeus decided to give the poor man the gift of inner version, the prophetic insights of a seer, to compensate for his wife physically blinding Tiresias due to his honesty.
This is how Tiresias became the blind seer who foretold Oedipus that he would kill his father and copulate with his mother. I’ve spent years wondering which nine parts of human sexuality Tiresias claims favor women and what was the only part that favored men because I’ve wanted to write a one-man (sic) play about Tiresias that finally exposes his responses to his ten-point comparison of which gender receives the greatest pleasure. Here’s my list:
Nine Parts to the Women: #1. Women have orgasms not men. Men have ejaculations. Women can achieve an orgasmic altered state whereas men most often just feel a profound sense of relief. The patriarchy calls ejaculations orgasms because they never want women to consider themselves superior in any way, so they pretend the sexual experience is equal for both genders. #2. Men most often strain to finish with a grunt of relief, whereas women shriek in ecstasy. #3. Women are sexually superior to men because they have the courage to join the dual nature of pain with pleasure. #4. A woman can tell if a man is sexually aroused by looking at his erection. A woman’s response isn’t obvious, so she can make the male work harder to prove his manhood by feigning a lack of desire so he puts more effort into pleasing her. His testosterone will poison his ego if he thinks he’s not as desirable or can’t please. Viewing his erection is a visual power she can withhold from him.
As opposed to male performance anxiety, a woman can enjoy sexual pleasure when she turns her brain off and is calm, which shows that a woman also has a brain she can control below her waist. #6. Women can have multiple orgasms so she can accept many more sexual partners in a day while men are busy recovering from their ejaculations. Thus, if one male partner doesn’t satisfy her, she can immediately move on to another lover. #7. The clitoris alone has over 8,000 nerve endings to enhance pleasure. The penis has less than half that number of nerve endings. #8 “When you scratch the inside of your ear using your finger, which one feels better? The finger or the ear?” #9 While men’s sex organs serve more than one function, a woman’s clitoris has no other purpose but to give her pleasure during sex.
One Part to Men: A male having sex with a female does not have to suffer the fear of pregnancy or childbirth.
Mark Blickley grew up within walking distance of New York’s Bronx Zoo. He is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center. His latest book is the flash fiction collection, ‘Hunger Pains’ (Buttonhook Press).
The Shore: On Poets, Schiller And Making Mention Of The Goethean Observation
This is a prose poem that on the face of it in so many words is for children in conflict, war and genocide around the world from a South African poet, writing with a distinct voice for the voiceless. Writing too for the marginalised and disenfranchised, and those experiencing scarcity, lack and poverty in their lives.
“Art is the daughter of freedom,” said Friedrich Schiller, but I say that true art, writing, reading, and expressing oneself is the most noble form of the communication of the heart. Difficult to attain, tough to master but the experience, negative or positive, is thoroughly worthwhile. It is an experience that gives rise to stamina, willpower, inner strength and discipline. It was the following poets: Dennis Brutus who lived that experience, Victor Wessels who embraced it. It is poets, contemporary poets and beyond, that define that specific experience (in my books) for generations to come of what a poetic life, poetic drive, poetic force truly means. It is an experience that is based on revolutionary struggle and power, strategy, design and personal freedom.
A true poet speaks from an act, a scholarly act, a pause between words, a calm interlude, the brutal heart, vulnerabilities, and images that the pen puts to paper. Putting pen to paper is sometimes all that it takes, resting awareness against wave after wave, vibration after vibration. A true poet walks that powerful line that borders dream and reality, invention and pathway into the unknown, into uncertainty. A true poet leaps into that unknown, leaps across the boundaries and borders of heaven and cloud, and the same poet creates a vision out of nothing, out of art, out of words, out of clay hands. This artistry is unique. It belongs to the poet alone, as Dennis Brutus demonstrated in Letters To Martha, Arthur Nortje in Roots and C. Swart in I Write Riddles And Remedies.
The poet tells us that out of pathetic sadness and the frustration found in struggle, hardship and despair that beauty can still be found in our aloneness, that there is still an enduring message of hope to be found in the unforgiving nature and energy of loneliness. In a time of war, I have discovered that Chantel Swart is one of those poets. Her gift resonates through bone and sinew. As I read her poetry, I draw a long breath and on the exhale I am reminded of things I want to remember but I am also reminded of things I don’t want to remember.
She is a writer who writes for the world, for the lonely, for the disenchanted, for the disenfranchised in the same ways Nizar Qabbani, Don Afrika Beukes, Tariro Ndoro, Tendai Rinos Mwanaka, Rupert Brooke, Eugene Skeef, Mongane Serote, Khaled Juma, Refaat Alaheer, Yehuda Amichai, Nick Mulgrew, Kiran Bhat, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Miri Ben-Simhon, Diana Ferrus and Clinton V. du Plessis, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan have written for the interloper, for those who belong and for those who feel empty, for those who want more out of life, for those that want to be loved on their terms. These are all the poets that make Goethean observations in their work. All the writers that I mentioned write for the outsider. The poet writes for humanity. Humanity is the outsider looking in, looking for love, looking for self-acceptance.
It is the poet that is courageous. It is the poet who forgives the sins of this harsh, cruel world but it is God who forgives absolutely.
Most of all it is recognition that is wanted. The outsider wants recognition, and it is perhaps only the poet that can grant them that, isn’t that what Don Mattera defined a generation as, isn’t that what the freedom fighters who wrote poetry risked, risk? They faced assassination, and that elusive feeling of being loved for who they are, they want their identity to be embraced, they want to be identified, named, claimed, represented in the face of smoke, bone and flesh.
I remember so many things when I read poetry. When the end of a relationship came in my life, it took me years to acknowledge the pain of that ending. I discovered personal freedom and peace of mind in poetry. Childhood again, for one. That collection of sweetness and longing for mother, the presence of father and abandonment, ruin and a kind of wounded, hurt feeling. I am also reminded of a broken world, my broken world, a broken life, capturing those heady emotions and feelings in stark and bleak images. Capturing them in photographs. There they exist on the pages of C. Swart’s poetry, these images, this bleak, dull feeling inside of me as fleeting as happiness, as temporary as day and sunset. They exist for me, and for another female poet. Other poets, people of the South, other poets from Africa. I meet the sun and prayer in my loneliness in Swart’s words, on those pages.
It is important to realise that as the world falls apart around you and collapses after you have lost someone that there will always be music. Now that the relationship has ended, now that the man who was very briefly in my life is gone that is what remains. All of this beautiful and wonderful music remains. When I want to remember, when I want to think about the past, that fleeting happiness I felt so many hours and years ago I play Erik Satie, the Russian composers or Jacqueline du Pre or other classical music. John Cage, for example, or Philip Glass and what will come to me is the outline of the man’s face, the characteristic traits of his personality, the colour of the night as I watched him park his spaceship of a car in the driveway. All of these things have taken to mean so much to me. Yes, he changed me, and he is still significant.
Yes, he is still important to me. Poetry is still important to me. The crash of the music resonates throughout my entire body and a calmness is restored inside my heart. I think as I listen to the rhythm inside the piano keys of the man and I can hear him smile. I feel an ache tearing me up inside as I think of my sadness and his newfound happiness, the relationship that he has now in the country he calls home but it doesn’t matter because I have music. I have Daniel Barenboim and Leonard Bernstein and videos of ballet to watch. And as long as I have tears I will have music.
I listen to this music from the soundtrack of the film The Hours and it’s as if he’s still here. It’s as if he’s still alive for me. Your memory is still alive for me and that’s what counts. The music offers me up his memory and once more his important to me and even this is significant to me. We never really lose in love. It is just the measure of loss and grief in time. Temporary pastimes. Fleeting moments that are viewed with such precision and such mental acumen. Poets live energetic lives in flux, within a maelstrom that is never ending and that can be burdensome if they don’t get it down on paper. All I want to know as the music rises and rises and crashes against every cell in my chest and rib cage and lung and bone and meets all of this pent-up emotion within, what are the contemporary poets hailing from Africa listening to? I wonder to myself, does the man still think of me at all? I can still hear the sound of his voice in this room and sometimes that is all that matters to me. Tragic. Tragic. How tragic is that and what a bittersweet ending. Not the fairy tale after all but an ending nonetheless. I get up and make tea. The music isn’t playing anymore but it is in my heart.
Poetry belongs to the positive and the negative vibration in the wave alone. If you are a poet you speak of the truth, of what you envision, whether it is a clearer understanding of the things we hold dear in life or what we stand in solidarity with. Even the poet is innocent and can be quite innocent in their language that they use.
Even a child can understand what is right and what is wrong and the poet holds up his pen and declares like a child, like every child what is right and what is wrong. That to me is the definition of innocent. There is no struggle, no despair, no hardship in realising and acknowledging what the truth is. It is struggle, despair and hardship that is complex.
That is difficult to define and draw boundaries around. It is struggle, despair and hardship that is complicated.
When I think of Credo Mutwa, I think of the (Native American) shamans. I think of Rumi. I think of Khalil Gibran. If we do not read and write and master reading and writing how will we ever truly articulate our pain. The experience of happiness is a beautiful experience and it can be profound but pain, emotional pain, the “dense pain body” that Eckhart Tolle spoke of in The Power Of Now can be profound too and both happiness and pain can transform our being. This change can be inspiring, a motivating factor in our lives. To these people, to the poets that came before and after, money, wealth and prosperity meant nothing to them, as did material possessions. To our intellectuals, our philosophers, our teachers it is what leads to the betterment of society that is significant to them, what are the aspects of humanity that are noble and virtuous. The greatest of these are the poets, poetry.
It is far easier to carry pain in one’s heart than happiness. It is far easier to acknowledge a clinical depression than to laugh. But in the face of both suffering and malevolence in the world, in the face of sadness, utter despair and struggle, in the face of solitude, silence and the endless hours stretching out before you, there is poetry. There will always be poetry that will save you.
To taste the sweetness of life, to experience the hardship and overwhelming grief of loss and the emptiness of the world without your loved one at your side. For melancholy to always be in your inner circle, for clinical depression to never leave you, for flowers and the smell of incense burning to be a constant presence in your life, on your desk, beside your papers and important books is for your soul to be absolutely ruled by and run by and nurtured by and nourished by poetry. Who is a poet? What is a poet? If life exists, if you are alive, then you are a poet.
In love you will always find despair, always, but in poetry, for poetry to exist, it means love must exist. It means that suffering and death must co-exist. The hours may be empty but you will always have shapes of consolation. Even the intellect can and will offer you hope and cause for reflection for nothing is lost in life. The sea has waves and even the river can nourish your soul. Look, from the river to the sea, the poet finds whatever nourishes their soul. The blue sky, the green grass. You choose. It is always your choice. To despair or find the silver lining, find life, find love.
Published on the Modern Diplomacy website in the African Renaissance blog on November 14, 2024 and published again on the Ovi website on November 23, 2024.
